Poetic Theory in the Depression Years: Language, Objectivity, and Image in the Poems of William Carlos Williams and Bertolt Brecht

POETIC THEORY IN THE DEPRESSION YEARS: LANGUAGE, OBJECTIVITY, AND IMAGE IN THE POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND BERTOLT BRECHT K. H. Klotz Any study ofpoetic theory is inexorably connected with the practical function ofpoetry in human Ufe. The question as to its purpose becomes all the more relevant for the vast majority of its recipients in times of economic hardship. A contrastive study of Williams's and Brecht's work during the Great Depression is therefore apt to render answers to the question of whether poetry in the modern world still holds practical value. The emergence ofmodernism as a sociocultural period led literary and phüosophical thinkers into an unparalleled crisis which is still lingering on—if not increasing—and Uterature responded to it in extreme forms ofadjustment or repulsion. For decades after the initial technological and industrial chaUenge, Uterature's leading theorists thought they had found an appropriate response in political and didactic poetry. The issue of art and propaganda surfaced in its full scope, accompanied by the struggle to find a poetic medium that avoided both "art for art's sake" and poUtical campaigning in the guise of poetry. Both Williams and Brecht can be said to have been singularly and progressively aware of this issue and to have sought ways ofresolving it by reconcüing the antipodes of art and propaganda. At first glance, one anticipation seems entirely legitimate: Brecht's poetry is far more poUtical than WilUams's. One could prematurely conclude that Williams's poetry is less didactic and thus less successful in conveying a beneficial purpose to the reading pubUc in times of distress. Conversely, Brecht's poetry would then appear to lack artistic quality and would likewise fail to be absorbed by the reader, whose physical wants clearly predominated over the inteUectual or psychological ones. However, such conclusions are premature and ül-founded, especiaUy upon closer inspection ofWilUams's tenets of diagnosing, criticizing, and re-creating culture through literature. On the basis of Burke's concept of Williams as a literary and cultural "medicine man," Bremen (6) has interpreted Williams's poetic criticism etymologically, as "making a . . . diagnosis." With regard to the third component, that of re-creating culture, he has even ascribed a "regenerative force" (192) to Williams's poetic language, thus opening up a political perspective which may not be apparent at first glance. Yet it wül manifest itself in the light of what Bremen labels "poetry as medicine" (8) and "the diagnostics of culture": "a cultural critique that acts as both an engaged diagnosis and a step toward cure." It is on these grounds that Bremen is able to display "WilUams 's abiding concern with the poUtical and its integral position within his poetics" (121). In my estimation, there is no doubt that in the turmoil of the 1930s Brecht and Williams were amongst the very few who tackled the issue Vol. 20 (1996): 126 THE COMPAnATIST of art and propaganda. They recognized the pitfalls of either becoming blatantly political or resorting to an escapist ideaUsm. Their "poetic creed" (Tarn 80) was not pre-estabhshed, but consciously adjusted to the needs of their readerships. They both had to seek and develop a poetic strategy to satisfy these needs, and at the core of this search was what WiUiams termed "my struggle to get a form" (Tarn 34). When we discuss poetic form here, aU genres are affected, since drama, lyrical poetry, and the narrative intermingle in the works ofboth poets—another symptom of their search for, and experimentation with, an appropriate medium. However, verse wül be at the center ofour investigation since, by its very nature, the poem best conveyed the new methodology of simpUcity, conciseness and concreteness to be ülustrated below. IfMuranga justifiably speaks of poetry as the genre most capable of abstraction—"abstraktionsf áhigste Gattung" (99)—this only highlights the difficult task that Williams and Brecht had before them: that of avoiding symboUzation, generaUzation and abstraction, and putting their objectivist and imagist sküls on trial, always in jeopardy of becoming either too ideally remote or too politically outspoken. To the two leftists Williams and Brecht, the rise of capitalism also brought a singular awareness...